The U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief supporting a Christian baker in Colorado.

“The Trump administration weighed into one of the marquee cases of the coming Supreme Court term Thursday, backing a Christian baker in a dispute over public accommodations laws and religious liberty.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus (or “friend-of-the-court”) brief supporting a Christian baker in Colorado who declined to create a wedding cake with a pro-LGBT message for a gay couple planning their nuptials. The baker, Jack Phillips, was sanctioned by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for violating the state’s public accommodations law, which prohibits discrimination against certain protected classes in commercial transactions. The Justice Department argues the state is coercing Phillips into creating expression with which he disagrees, in violation of the First Amendment.

“The Department filed an amicus brief in this case today because the First Amendment protects the right of free expression for all Americans,” Justice Department spokeswoman Lauren Ehrsam said in a statement. “Although public-accommodations laws serve important purposes, they — like other laws — must yield to the individual freedoms that the First Amendment guarantees. That includes the freedom not to create expression for ceremonies that violate one’s religious beliefs.”

The administration’s filing came on the same day that over 80 congressional Republicans filed their own amicus brief in support of Phillips.

In the brief, the Department says that the high court has consistently ruled in favor of free expression where speech and general laws regulating conduct collide, and that requiring Phillips to create such expression intrudes upon his First Amendment rights.

“A custom wedding cake is a form of expression, whether pure speech or the product of expressive conduct,” the brief reads. “It is an artistic creation that is both subjectively intended and objectively perceived as a celebratory symbol of a marriage.”

“Forcing Phillips to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs invades his First Amendment rights,” it adds.

The brief also emphasizes that it’s arguments could not be leveraged in a challenge to an anti-discrimination law like the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race and sex discrimination in the work place, private businesses, and public spaces.

“For the most part, individual First Amendment rights have coexisted comfortably with federal and state public accommodations laws,” DOJ argues. “That is because those laws generally focus on preventing discriminatory conduct rather than modifying the content of expression. Under ordinary circumstances, content-neutral laws that regulate conduct rather than speech receive no First Amendment scrutiny, even where they have ‘incidental’ effects on speech.”

The high court agreed to hear the dispute in June, though the case has not yet been scheduled for argument. The Supreme Court will reconvene from its summer recess on Oct. 2….”

Hillary Clinton and What Happened to the Nature of Woman

By Christopher Chantrill at American Thinker:

“The title of Hillary Clinton’s post-deplorable book tells it all: What Happened.

Notice the lack of agency.

But wait! I thought that the whole point of feminism and women’s liberation was that finally, after the age-old oppression of the patriarchy, women were going to come out into the world and be free and responsible agents of their own destiny.

Hey girls! What Happened?

Okay. I admit it. I have not read Hillary Clinton’s post-election non mea culpa — that’s Latin for Not My Fault — and I don’t intend to. In fact, I have never read any of Hillary Clinton’s books and I hope I never will. It is nothing personal. I just think, without a particle of evidence, that I could learn a lot more about life, the universe, and everything from plugging through Andrew Roberts’ 935-page doorstopper on the life of British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury than anything I might glean from the scintillating mind of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But what I gather from what other people say about Hillary Clinton’s book is that Hillary blames her loss on just about everybody from President Obama to Matt Lauer to her campaign staff to the deplorables.

Years ago I had a male acquaintance who announced that whenever he does something that annoys his wife she recites The Catalog: everything mean that he had ever done to her since they first met 50 years ago. They shoulda called Hillary’s book The Catalog.

I am not surprised about Hillary’s book. I believe that there is something fundamental about the Nature of Woman that that makes it almost impossible for a human female to let go of anything, ever. She remembers What Happened to her as if it were yesterday, and never ceases to “share” with her friends that the other person is to blame and must apologize to her before normal relations can resume.

So what happened to women’s liberation, girls? What happened to that seminal Chapter XXV in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex titled “The Independent Woman”?

The answer is as simple as it is obvious. Women don’t want to be independent. That is what everything from What Happened to safe spaces to microaggressions to the rape crisis is all about. Women want to be able to blame everyone else for What Happened, and they don’t really want to be independent and responsible.

Now I do not hold this against women, not at all. I take it as a confirmation of the Nature of Woman, and a reminder that the Nature of Woman is profoundly different from the nature of men.

This profound difference between men and women is illustrated by the question of the Mistake. No woman can look down upon the little Mistake playing at her feet and blame herself for her stupidity in getting involved with that loser or charmer or beta male, and then finding out that he was a vile chancer. Because that Mistake cannot really be a mistake. It must all be somebody else’s fault.

You see this in the campus rape hysteria, just recapped by John Hawkins. When a man is falsely accused of rape it often seems to issue from the need of the woman in question to avoid admitting that she made a mistake.

Now, it is my belief that the essence of being a man is to get up every day and clear the decks of past mistakes and regrets. It is the nature of human life that the past is littered with mistakes. But unless you can get past the mistakes you will be immobilized by guilt and regret and unable to move forward and act. Just like Hillary Clinton.

In other words, you cannot advance to agency and responsibility unless you are able to deal with and move on from your mistakes. That is why the tech startup culture is overwhelmingly male. Most startups are failures, so you cannot survive for long unless you can slough off your mistakes as a snake sloughs off its skin.

Of course, none of this applies to our glorious conservative women who are as loving and brave and independent and responsible as any man in Illyria. I suspect that the reason for this is that many conservative women are Christians and Christianity has a curious culture of the Forgiveness of Sins. If you make a mistake, you confess it to God and pray for forgiveness and Absolution. Next morning you are up and at ‘em, just like a man.

But liberal women don’t have that culture, and so they marinate in their mistakes and their cats and wonder What Happened, and blame the patriarchy for everything.

They should try Christianity; they might get to experience the pleasure of having anti-religious bigots in the Senate asking them if they are now, or have ever been, a Christian.”

JAMES COMEY IN THE DOCK? AND MORE

by John Hinderaker at PowerLine:

“I think Sarah Sanders is a terrific press secretary. In her press briefing today, she handled the White House press corps with her usual aplomb. The White House emphasized President Trump’s efforts toward a bipartisan tax reform bill, but James Comey also came up, repeatedly:

Q [by New York Times reporter] Is the President aware that Steve Bannon described firing James Comey as the biggest mistake in modern political history?

MS. SANDERS: Whether he is or not, I think that everybody knows exactly where the President stands on that issue. The President is proud of the decision that he made. The President was 100 percent right in firing James Comey. He knew at the time that it could be bad for him politically but he also knew and felt he had an obligation to do what was right, and do what was right for the American people and certainly the men and women at the FBI.

I think there is no secret Comey, by his own self-admission, leaked privileged government information. Weeks before President Trump fired him, Comey testified that an FBI agent engaged in the same practice; they face serious repercussions. I think he set his own stage for himself on that front. His actions were improper and likely could have been illegal.

Comey leaked memos to the New York Times, your own outlet. He politicized an investigation by signaling he would exonerate Hillary Clinton before he ever interviewed her or other key witnesses.

He is very happy with the decision he made, and I think he has been fully vindicated by a lot of those new things and knowing that it was the right one.

Hard-hitting, to say the least. A bit later another reporter followed up:

Q You said that the actions of James Comey could have been illegal. You, the other day, referred to potential false testimony. The DOJ is not commenting, but I would put to you, would the President encourage the DOJ to prosecute Comey?

MS. SANDERS: That’s not the President’s role. That’s the job of the Department of Justice, and something they should certainly look at.

The White House thinks that Jeff Sessions should be considering a criminal prosecution of James Comey. That’s news.

Q Is that something you’d like to see?

MS. SANDERS: I’m not sure about that specifically, but I think if there’s ever a moment where we feel someone has broken the law, particularly if they’re the head of the FBI, I think that’s something that certainly should be looked at.

A few minutes later, a further exchange:

Q Thank you, Sarah. Yesterday, when you were talking about James Comey, you mentioned that he gave false testimony. I didn’t hear you say that again today. Do you still stand by that?

MS. SANDERS: I did say that actually today.

Q You did say —

MS. SANDERS: Yeah.

Actually, she hadn’t said it, but in that answer she stood by the allegation. Is it possible that a criminal prosecution of James Comey is in store? It seems highly unlikely, but perhaps Comey won’t sleep well tonight. If so, his unrest is well deserved.

There was much more of interest in today’s press briefing, including this question and answer about Hillary Clinton’s book:

Q And also, will the President be reading Hillary Clinton’s book? (Laughter.) And what does he think about the excerpts that have gotten out so far?

MS. SANDERS: Whether or not he’s going to read Hillary Clinton’s book, I am not sure. But I would think that he’s pretty well-versed on “what happened.” And I think it’s pretty clear to all of America. I think it’s sad that after Hillary Clinton ran one of the most negative campaigns in history and lost, the last chapter of her public life is going to be now defined by propping up book sales with false and reckless attacks. And I think that that’s a sad way for her to continue this work.

That was an appropriately charitable evaluation from, in my view, a very able press secretary.”